Even if you’re white, even if you’re wearing a backpack, the police cars will slow as they pass you.  “You’re a student coming home from the library, is all.  It’s so ridiculous for you to worry,” a friend says. 

As a kid I wanted to be a fireman.  I was obsessed with the trucks, the bells and whistles, the easy gallantry.  When you’re a fireman you never really have to do anything controversial.  There’s plenty of noise and a lot of downtime.  People are proud of you.  

The station across from school responds to a lot of pulled fire alarms and even more alcohol poisonings, 100-pound girls getting flashlights pointed into their pupils, their name repeated with commands, a puddle of weak vomit on the floor with their elbow in it.  “Claire?  Claire?  Look at me, Claire.”   

Sometimes I go for walks in the middle of the night.  It’s because I’m thinking about people I want to affect or change.  I put on a big puffy ski jacket and walk out past my roommates who will be awake all night misbehaving.  I turn my music on almost to full blast, hide the iPod in my pocket, and pass by the buildings.  

The construction funded by millionaire alumni donors, the soon-to-be-bulldozed parking lots having their floors ripped up by half a metallic mouth, the equipment in its resting place like the workers all just left for a moment.  At night, empty, it looks staged, like a museum piece. 

The other thing I wanted to be when I was little was a construction worker.  Children’s toys are geared toward these sorts of things.  The backhoes and trailers, the soft plastic orange cones for making your own caution lanes on the floor.  Men of service.  Their purpose and beliefs really simple, an early symbol of stoic manhood.  As soon as they get home, they fall right asleep because they’ve been working hard all day.       

For a college student who feels really complicated, listening to pounding, angry rap music through go-deaf white ear buds (the style of the times), thinking in a vague hue of male ether, the pure unconsciousness of metal in the middle of the night seems alienating but somehow true.  

I know a guy who got his girlfriend pregnant when he was twenty, dropped out of school, and joined a union.  It’s nice to know that it’s easy as that.  I’m pausing for just a second when another cop car drives by, gliding quietly like a shark, belly down.   

In two years, because I don’t want a bike, I’ve done an enormous amount of walking.  In the morning I stand on a street corner and spit, not really thinking nicely about breakfast because it’s that awkward time and feeling.  Any food would only add to the vagueness, to the pressure behind the nose and between the eyes.  The crosswalk beeps as we move diagonally across the Los Angeles street covered sporadically with sparkling glass from the back windows of cars. 

About three or four years ago a student was killed and another injured while crossing the street a block down from where I use it every morning, all day, most nights.  It happened at 2 or 3 in the morning.  I remember folding the newspaper that had her face on it.   

Sometimes in the afternoon, on weekends, it’s nice to go for a walk and get out of the room.  Campus is half as crowded but still occupied, certain places more than others.  I follow the same route: the cinema building (large and full of names), the athletic hall, the journalism school, the track.  The fine arts area, during stressful times, smells like marijuana.  The studio lights are always on. 

I listen to Eminem and punk rock on my walks.  It’s a time for fantasy in the middle of reality.  “The road we were lost on cut straight through the middle of the world,” Denis Johnson said in a book I read in August. 

I never see anyone who would hurt me.  People say the area is full of “have nots.”  Freshman year I read an article in the school paper about how campus police had set up a camera system that would follow students walking by themselves at night.  I wonder about the file they could have on me there.  “WHITE MALE.  ROUGHLY SIX FEET TALL.  SLIGHT BUILD, NO TATTOOS.  BROWN HAIR, BROWN EYES.  WALKING VERY, VERY FAST FOR NO APPARENT REASON.” 

When I’m having a bad day, a little frustrated, all the bike riders are self-centered fascists.  Without consolidation of strength they all provide a harried chaos.  Girls wearing dresses or skirts have to play that game of keeping their legs together, a hand pressing into their lap, an ephemeral self-hatred in their clenched faces.  Guys passing each other trying to high five (how stupid, I think), only spiraling the weaker of the two out of control and into the paths of cars.  And anyone who tries to text and ride at the same time deserves something really awful in his or her life.   

I am a man of my own legs, but I have the personality for it.  I know that one day a bike is going to burn my legs with its tires (“my time will come,” I say).  So many people hate being early, hate having the space, hate being one of the people standing on tile in the hallway before class starts.  I like being by myself but I really like being by myself in public.  I’m able to drink a lot of tea.  The woman at the cart and I have an ongoing conversation about wanting to go home. 

One time I was walking to the pool.  As strange as it sounds, my first year of college I lived in a hotel.  I’d leave the hall in the elevator, having to explain myself to the inevitable friend sitting on the floor against the wall, computer in the lap, roommate inside making out with her boyfriend.  “I need to release some steam.”  The woman who worked the gift shop was hysterical, cut everyone off from the doorway.  

A man had jumped from the seventh floor fire escape, two floors above my room.  We watched the coroner arrive from our windows.  I was interviewed for the school paper.  There was hardly any other press on it.  The next day, the pool was open again as if nothing had happened.  The clay-colored ground had scrape marks and the tile overhang was cracked, but it might as well have been because of violent weather (which doesn’t happen in L.A.).   

I’ve walked past arrests in progress, guns in officers’ hands: “Why you pointing that thing at me for, man?”  I’ve seen a girl I know modeling by a fountain in the campus center, a guy snapping photos of her in black and too much make-up.  “Make love to the camera, baby,” I imagine him saying.  

People by the library ask me if I have any cigarettes, Adderall making their eyes red.  I have to tell them no.  People leaving and coming home in cabs.  They take the pillows under their arms and hand over a tip and a thank you.  I think, If I wanted to, I could ask that car to take me anywhere in the city.    

Most of the time things are really painfully normal.  Because this is Los Angeles, the dryness will find you on days when you really don’t need it.  Halfway across the grass quad the sweat starts to appear in the elbows of my flannel, a layer of grime on the lower neck like silt.  You take deep, exasperated breaths.  

You see people you know but only from walking by them.   

 

Reach Michael Juliani here.